thoughts on B&N

so. barnes&noble. i know that you all have them. i have to say, though, truthfully, it's a big box store that i don't mind. so, i sat down at one of their tables beside the magazine racks last week [and while looking at my trendy design and photog mags] and wrote a few lines. it went something like this... bookstores/coffeeshops are great places to be.

at least for me, i can't keep myself away. any given week will find me visting a coffeeshop/bookstore at least, at least 3 days out of the week, typically 4 or 5.

they are very inspiring places to be. so much creativity in one place is just amazing. i could go into a few different directions here, but i want to focus on the store itself, ideologically. could you not consider bookstores to be museums? that is the main question i'm posing. And I make that statment on this basis: writing is art. i'm not really aware if there are actual museums for books, maybe for like 1st editions or something, or maybe even libraries. but writing, as an art form, why would bookstores not be considered a type museum?

maybe it's because of the nature of the art of writing. there is definitely something unique about it. books can be reproduced many, many times and the copies are just as powerful as the original. if that doesn't speak to the power of writing, i'm not sure what would. i mean, take a Picasso or Pollock, or Rothko: do copies of this type of art speak the same as the original? I would argue no... there is something 'lost in the translation'.

It's a museum whose galleries are constantly changing yet remain the same to some degree. there is an antiquity about the contents of bookstores, yet most of the books were probably printed within the past year or so.

it's quite a phenomenon, and i can't get over it.